Going, Going, Gone
I am going on a city break to Berlin later this year and so I was very pleased to come across this article in The Sunday Times by Peter Millar who has written a book on his part in the downfall of the notorious Berlin Wall.
I think I'll buy the book and when I get to Berlin I'll raise a glass to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union, for the role he played in bringing freedom and democracy to much of central and eastern Europe.
Going, going ... communism gone
Twenty-five years ago this month, Peter Millar was there when the Berlin Wall fell and there too when freedom swept on to Prague and the Baltic. He relives those astonishing days
By Peter Millar - The Sunday Times
Election charade to split Ukraine West Berliners tear down the wall on November 11, 1989 as East German police look on (SIPA/Rex)
IT WAS the birthday party from hell. For hours 77-year-old Erich Honecker, the hardline dictator of the Kremlin’s most faithful fiefdom, stood to attention, his hand raised in a stiff salute, as the East German army strutted past.
The German Democratic Republic was celebrating its 40th anniversary. Reporting the parade for The Sunday Times, I watched as Honecker was fraternally embraced cheek-to-cheek by Mikhail Gorbachev.
He had no idea it was a Judas kiss. Nor did anyone on that chill Saturday evening in October 1989 realise that within days Honecker would be ousted, within weeks the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down (the 25th anniversary is next Sunday) and in two years the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist.
As the East German and Soviet leaders headed to an anniversary dinner after the parade, crowds of East Berliners converged on the city centre, waving banners and shouting “Gorby, Gorby”.
They saw in Gorbachev the herald of a long overdue loosening of the socialist straitjacket. For weeks unrest had been growing in East German cities.
Honecker was not listening, however. From the Alexanderplatz headquarters of the police, serried ranks of men in full riot gear charged out to enforce order.
So many developments in the 1980s had led inexorably to this moment: Poland’s Solidarity free trade union, Hungary’s “goulash communism” with its blind eye to private enterprise and porous borders and, most crucially, Gorbachev’s retreat from empire.
Within minutes the East Berliners shouting his name were running scared as the police laid in to them. I ran, too, every bit as scared.
The police pursued us, batons flailing, into the rundown streets of inner-city Prenzlauer Berg. Lights came on in the upper windows of the six-storey tenement blocks as the inhabitants leant out to shout abuse. Grannies dropped precious eggs on policemen’s heads.
I knew the back streets well, having lived in Prenzlauer Berg in my mid-twenties as a foreign correspondent, but I was trapped with several hundred others near Schönhauser Allee station. The police backed up two armoured prison vans with their doors opened like iron jaws and used truncheons to force us inside.
In a floodlit police yard in the distant suburbs we were hurled against tiled walls, legs apart, truncheons run roughly up the inside leg. It was time to produce my passport. I was taken away to an upstairs office and interrogated overnight by two “plainclothes police”, then driven to the frontier and expelled.
Two days later 70,000 peaceful demonstrators challenged the regime again in Leipzig, marching past the opera house and the city’s Stasi headquarters. Gorbachev, back in Moscow, crucially refused Honecker’s request to send Soviet troops who were garrisoned nearby.
Within little more than a week, courtesy of dual nationality, I was back in East Berlin. The border guards I had known for years let me through the Wall with no more than a quizzical glance. Neither they nor I was aware that earlier that evening in a palace putsch, Honecker had been forced out of office.
His successor, Egon Krenz, a party hack dubbed “Horse-face”, was an inept crisis manager. After three weeks of indecision his reformed politburo agreed to allow East Germans to apply “freely” for visas to visit the West.
At a press conference on the evening of November 9, the politburo member making the announcement, Günter Schabowski, messed it up. He said that East Germans would be allowed to cross the border. Asked when, he shrugged: “Immediately.”
This was misinterpreted as the unconditional opening of the frontier. East Berliners disbelieved it but flocked to the wall to see for themselves.
The Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in Prenzlauer Berg was overwhelmed by hundreds of citizens demanding passage to the West. With barely a half dozen border guards and no other orders, the local commander let out a few at a time.
East Berliners, watching West Berlin television as usual, saw live scenes of their fellow citizens crossing the Wall. The hundreds became thousands. The guards had only two choices: a Tiananmen-style massacre or opening the gates.
They took the line of least resistance. Bureaucratic even in extremis, the border guards at Bornholmer Strasse would not let me join the flood to the West. As a foreigner I could only use Checkpoint Charlie.
The situation there was just as chaotic. East Berliners were massed on one side, West Berliners on the other.
I pushed my way through, past the hapless armed guards, into the West. My hair was tousled by cheering crowds who thrust a beer can into my hand and said: “Welcome to freedom.”
I joined the biggest party in the world. On the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s glitziest boulevard, I met East Berlin friends.
They broke open bottles of sparkling wine they had brought with them, unable to afford prices in the West. But on that night, in every bar, East Berliners drank free.
We partied until dawn, then staggered home across the Wall, none of us truly believing that by dusk the barriers would not be closed again. But already the Trabant cars were flowing across no man’s land the length of the inner-German border. The Wall stayed open.
Other communist dominos began to fall with astonishing rapidity. Within two weeks the Wall was being dismantled. With no clear idea what the future would bring, I was in Prague. The Czechoslovaks had long since taken to the streets, backed by leading dissidents from the arts, against a diehard communist regime.
The Magic Lantern theatre in the city centre became an unofficial forum for debate for the intellectual leaders of the growing revolution. On the evening of November 24, when a “human chain” protest on the streets was planned, the slight figure of Vaclav Havel, the playwright, sat on the stage musing over the events in Berlin.
All of a sudden I saw a student dash up and whisper in his ear. Havel looked stunned, disbelieving, then smiled. “I have to tell you that the leadership of the Communist party have resigned,” he announced.
The news sparked spontaneous celebrations that I still recall as one of the most magical nights of my life. In an attempt to put it into words, I framed a sentence of almost Proustian length that tried to mimic the joyful momentum of that evening.
“A hands-across-Prague protest designed as a human chain became instead a merry dance, a living tableau from a Bruegel painting, as laughing, skipping people in warm mufflers and long scarves formed an endless twisting snake around the trees, through the snowy park, up to the floodlit spires, the castle itself and the archbishop’s palace, then helter-skelter, slithered giggling down steep, slippery, narrow cobbled streets and, holding hands with exaggerated formality in a pastiche mazurka, passed across the 15th-century Charles Bridge, watched by stern statues of all the saints, and on to Wenceslas Square.”
The story was not yet wholly over. On Christmas Day the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were shot by firing squad after fleeing a violent revolt in Bucharest.
By March 1990 I was in Lithuania watching the barricades go up in the centre of the capital, Vilnius, as it became the first of the Soviet Baltic republics to declare independence from Moscow. Latvia and Estonia soon followed suit. The Russians sent in tanks, but again Gorbachev declined to unleash a massacre.
By August the following year I was sitting on barricades in Moscow itself, after the rest of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had begun to fall apart and a group of hardline communists staged a coup against Gorbachev.
It lasted barely three days, stalled by his old rival, Boris Yeltsin.
I have vivid memories of young Russians in torn jeans and stolen police caps playing guitars and singing protest songs in anticipation of a brave new world
Unfortunately, a quarter of a century on, it has not all turned out like that. The old Soviet satellites in the eastern bloc and the three Baltic republics have embraced democracy and the West. Russia and Belarus have not. Ukraine’s fate is still unresolved.
The events of 1989 seemed, to a large extent, the end of a European civil war that had begun with the old pre-1914 empires tearing at each other a century ago. But we are still living with the aftershocks.
Extracted from 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall by Peter Millar, published in a new updated 25th anniversary edition by Arcadia Books at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times bookshop on 0845 271 2135
The good old dictatorship days
AS THE anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, Germans and foreign visitors to the city are queuing up to experience a nostalgic view of the former East Germany.
Listening to a tape of an interrogation by the Stasi or driving a Trabant simulator through a workers’ model housing estate can bring back warm and fuzzy feelings even for former citizens.
The DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum in Berlin, which shows everyday life as well as state repression and surveillance, is one of the most popular tourist attractions with more than 500,000 visitors a year.
In a recent survey 59% of the citizens of the former East Germany, especially people over 60, said they were proud of the achievements of their reviled former country and its communist way of life.
Visitors to the museum can see how East German children were educated and indoctrinated, how much workers earned and could buy and what people did on holiday — nudism was popular and there are films of comrades frolicking naked on beaches.
“Showing everyday life is important to explain how the DDR was able to survive for 40 years,” said Robert Rückel, the museum project manager. “Yes, the DDR was a dictatorship, but you can’t explain everything just by showing the Stasi and the Berlin Wall.”
In the years after the wall fell, the East’s socialist values and its often inferior products, such as the smoke-belching, plastic Trabant, were denounced and thrown on the scrap heap. Even people’s heroes had their haloes smashed, such as Katarina Witt, the Olympic ice skater, when files were released showing that the feared Stasi had treated her favourably.
Yet now, in a supermarket close to Alexanderplatz, you can once again buy Vita Cola, the anti-capitalist soft drink, and at an online store you can even order Held der Arbeit Duschbad — Hero of Labour shower gel.
IT WAS the birthday party from hell. For hours 77-year-old Erich Honecker, the hardline dictator of the Kremlin’s most faithful fiefdom, stood to attention, his hand raised in a stiff salute, as the East German army strutted past.
The German Democratic Republic was celebrating its 40th anniversary. Reporting the parade for The Sunday Times, I watched as Honecker was fraternally embraced cheek-to-cheek by Mikhail Gorbachev.
He had no idea it was a Judas kiss. Nor did anyone on that chill Saturday evening in October 1989 realise that within days Honecker would be ousted, within weeks the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down (the 25th anniversary is next Sunday) and in two years the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist.
As the East German and Soviet leaders headed to an anniversary dinner after the parade, crowds of East Berliners converged on the city centre, waving banners and shouting “Gorby, Gorby”.
They saw in Gorbachev the herald of a long overdue loosening of the socialist straitjacket. For weeks unrest had been growing in East German cities.
Honecker was not listening, however. From the Alexanderplatz headquarters of the police, serried ranks of men in full riot gear charged out to enforce order.
So many developments in the 1980s had led inexorably to this moment: Poland’s Solidarity free trade union, Hungary’s “goulash communism” with its blind eye to private enterprise and porous borders and, most crucially, Gorbachev’s retreat from empire.
Within minutes the East Berliners shouting his name were running scared as the police laid in to them. I ran, too, every bit as scared.
The police pursued us, batons flailing, into the rundown streets of inner-city Prenzlauer Berg. Lights came on in the upper windows of the six-storey tenement blocks as the inhabitants leant out to shout abuse. Grannies dropped precious eggs on policemen’s heads.
I knew the back streets well, having lived in Prenzlauer Berg in my mid-twenties as a foreign correspondent, but I was trapped with several hundred others near Schönhauser Allee station. The police backed up two armoured prison vans with their doors opened like iron jaws and used truncheons to force us inside.
In a floodlit police yard in the distant suburbs we were hurled against tiled walls, legs apart, truncheons run roughly up the inside leg. It was time to produce my passport. I was taken away to an upstairs office and interrogated overnight by two “plainclothes police”, then driven to the frontier and expelled.
Two days later 70,000 peaceful demonstrators challenged the regime again in Leipzig, marching past the opera house and the city’s Stasi headquarters. Gorbachev, back in Moscow, crucially refused Honecker’s request to send Soviet troops who were garrisoned nearby.
Within little more than a week, courtesy of dual nationality, I was back in East Berlin. The border guards I had known for years let me through the Wall with no more than a quizzical glance. Neither they nor I was aware that earlier that evening in a palace putsch, Honecker had been forced out of office.
His successor, Egon Krenz, a party hack dubbed “Horse-face”, was an inept crisis manager. After three weeks of indecision his reformed politburo agreed to allow East Germans to apply “freely” for visas to visit the West.
At a press conference on the evening of November 9, the politburo member making the announcement, Günter Schabowski, messed it up. He said that East Germans would be allowed to cross the border. Asked when, he shrugged: “Immediately.”
This was misinterpreted as the unconditional opening of the frontier. East Berliners disbelieved it but flocked to the wall to see for themselves.
The Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in Prenzlauer Berg was overwhelmed by hundreds of citizens demanding passage to the West. With barely a half dozen border guards and no other orders, the local commander let out a few at a time.
East Berliners, watching West Berlin television as usual, saw live scenes of their fellow citizens crossing the Wall. The hundreds became thousands. The guards had only two choices: a Tiananmen-style massacre or opening the gates.
They took the line of least resistance. Bureaucratic even in extremis, the border guards at Bornholmer Strasse would not let me join the flood to the West. As a foreigner I could only use Checkpoint Charlie.
The situation there was just as chaotic. East Berliners were massed on one side, West Berliners on the other.
I pushed my way through, past the hapless armed guards, into the West. My hair was tousled by cheering crowds who thrust a beer can into my hand and said: “Welcome to freedom.”
I joined the biggest party in the world. On the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s glitziest boulevard, I met East Berlin friends.
They broke open bottles of sparkling wine they had brought with them, unable to afford prices in the West. But on that night, in every bar, East Berliners drank free.
We partied until dawn, then staggered home across the Wall, none of us truly believing that by dusk the barriers would not be closed again. But already the Trabant cars were flowing across no man’s land the length of the inner-German border. The Wall stayed open.
Other communist dominos began to fall with astonishing rapidity. Within two weeks the Wall was being dismantled. With no clear idea what the future would bring, I was in Prague. The Czechoslovaks had long since taken to the streets, backed by leading dissidents from the arts, against a diehard communist regime.
The Magic Lantern theatre in the city centre became an unofficial forum for debate for the intellectual leaders of the growing revolution. On the evening of November 24, when a “human chain” protest on the streets was planned, the slight figure of Vaclav Havel, the playwright, sat on the stage musing over the events in Berlin.
All of a sudden I saw a student dash up and whisper in his ear. Havel looked stunned, disbelieving, then smiled. “I have to tell you that the leadership of the Communist party have resigned,” he announced.
The news sparked spontaneous celebrations that I still recall as one of the most magical nights of my life. In an attempt to put it into words, I framed a sentence of almost Proustian length that tried to mimic the joyful momentum of that evening.
“A hands-across-Prague protest designed as a human chain became instead a merry dance, a living tableau from a Bruegel painting, as laughing, skipping people in warm mufflers and long scarves formed an endless twisting snake around the trees, through the snowy park, up to the floodlit spires, the castle itself and the archbishop’s palace, then helter-skelter, slithered giggling down steep, slippery, narrow cobbled streets and, holding hands with exaggerated formality in a pastiche mazurka, passed across the 15th-century Charles Bridge, watched by stern statues of all the saints, and on to Wenceslas Square.”
The story was not yet wholly over. On Christmas Day the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were shot by firing squad after fleeing a violent revolt in Bucharest.
By March 1990 I was in Lithuania watching the barricades go up in the centre of the capital, Vilnius, as it became the first of the Soviet Baltic republics to declare independence from Moscow. Latvia and Estonia soon followed suit. The Russians sent in tanks, but again Gorbachev declined to unleash a massacre.
By August the following year I was sitting on barricades in Moscow itself, after the rest of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had begun to fall apart and a group of hardline communists staged a coup against Gorbachev.
It lasted barely three days, stalled by his old rival, Boris Yeltsin.
I have vivid memories of young Russians in torn jeans and stolen police caps playing guitars and singing protest songs in anticipation of a brave new world
Unfortunately, a quarter of a century on, it has not all turned out like that. The old Soviet satellites in the eastern bloc and the three Baltic republics have embraced democracy and the West. Russia and Belarus have not. Ukraine’s fate is still unresolved.
The events of 1989 seemed, to a large extent, the end of a European civil war that had begun with the old pre-1914 empires tearing at each other a century ago. But we are still living with the aftershocks.
Extracted from 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall by Peter Millar, published in a new updated 25th anniversary edition by Arcadia Books at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times bookshop on 0845 271 2135
The good old dictatorship days
AS THE anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, Germans and foreign visitors to the city are queuing up to experience a nostalgic view of the former East Germany.
Listening to a tape of an interrogation by the Stasi or driving a Trabant simulator through a workers’ model housing estate can bring back warm and fuzzy feelings even for former citizens.
The DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum in Berlin, which shows everyday life as well as state repression and surveillance, is one of the most popular tourist attractions with more than 500,000 visitors a year.
In a recent survey 59% of the citizens of the former East Germany, especially people over 60, said they were proud of the achievements of their reviled former country and its communist way of life.
Visitors to the museum can see how East German children were educated and indoctrinated, how much workers earned and could buy and what people did on holiday — nudism was popular and there are films of comrades frolicking naked on beaches.
“Showing everyday life is important to explain how the DDR was able to survive for 40 years,” said Robert Rückel, the museum project manager. “Yes, the DDR was a dictatorship, but you can’t explain everything just by showing the Stasi and the Berlin Wall.”
In the years after the wall fell, the East’s socialist values and its often inferior products, such as the smoke-belching, plastic Trabant, were denounced and thrown on the scrap heap. Even people’s heroes had their haloes smashed, such as Katarina Witt, the Olympic ice skater, when files were released showing that the feared Stasi had treated her favourably.
Yet now, in a supermarket close to Alexanderplatz, you can once again buy Vita Cola, the anti-capitalist soft drink, and at an online store you can even order Held der Arbeit Duschbad — Hero of Labour shower gel.
